No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

How are ML developer tools helping to advance our capabilities? Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights & Biases, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Lukas explores the impact of ML in various industries like gaming, AgTech, and fintech through his insightful perspective. He discusses the impact of LLMs, puts them in context of the evolution of ML engineering over the past decade and a half, and tells the backstory of Weights & Biases' success. He gives advice for aspiring AI company founders, placing emphasis on customer feedback and using insecurity as a vehicle for better customer discovery.

Prior to founding Weights & Biases, Lukas attacked the problem of data collection for model training as the Founder of Figure Eight, which he sold in 2019. He holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.

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Show Notes: 

[0:00:00] - Lucas Wald's Journey in AI

[0:08:16] - Startup Evolution and Machine Learning

[0:18:54] - Open Source Models Implications and Adoption

[0:29:54] - ML Impact in Various Industries

[0:40:27] - Advice for AI Company Founders

Can frontiers as high-stakes as next-generation, AI-enabled defense depend on something as mundane as data integration? Can "large language models" work in such mission critical applications? In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Shyam Sankar, the Chief Technical Officer of Palantir Technologies and inventor of their famous Forward Deployed Engineering force.

Early employee and longtime leader Shyam explains the evolution of technology at Palantir, from ontology and data integration to process visualization and now AI. He describes how a company of Palantir's scale has adopted foundation models and shares customer stories. They discuss the case for open source AI models fine-tuned on private, domain-specific data, and the challenges of anchoring AI models in reality.

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Show Notes: 

[0:00:00] - Palantir's CTO Discusses Company's Background

[0:10:17] - Apollo and AIP

[0:20:25] - Future of UI and Application Integration

[0:28:29] - Investment in Co-Pilot Models and Education

[0:31:22] - Exploring AI Implementation in Various Industries

[0:38:19] - Operational and Analytical Workflows in Context

Video dominates modern media consumption, but video creation is still expensive and difficult. AI-generated and edited video is a holy grail of democratized creative expression. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Devi Parikh. She is a Research Director in Generative AI at Meta and an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her work focuses on multimodality and AI for images, audio and video. Recently, she worked on Make a Video 3D, also called MAV3D, which creates animations from text prompts. She is also a talented AI-generated and analog artist herself.

Elad, Sarah and Devi talk about what’s exciting in computer vision, what’s blocking researchers from fully immersive Generative 4-D, and AI controllability.

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Show Notes:

(0:00:06) - Democratizing Creative Expression With AI-Generated Video

(0:08:31) - Challenges in Video Generation Research

(0:15:57) - Challenges and Implications of Video Processing

(0:20:43) - Control and Multi-Modal Inputs in Video

(0:25:50) - Audio's Role in Visual Content

(0:39:00) - Don't Self-Select & Devi’s tips for young researchers

Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Computing, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Before scaling Snowflake to its blockbuster IPO and beyond, Frank was also the CEO from early to scale for landmark enterprise companies ServiceNow and Data Domain. Frank grew up in the Netherlands and is also the author of three books: Amp It Up, Rise of the Data Cloud, and Tape Sucks.

In this episode, our hosts talk with Frank about the opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise, why Snowflake isn't really a data warehousing company, their acquisitions of Neeva and Streamlit, apps within Snowflake, and how AI relates to traditional analytics and BI. He also talks about his personal journey, why it's always a good time to do performance management, and why most leaders struggle to raise the bar for performance.

** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. **

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Show Notes:

[00:06] - Frank’s Insights on Career Success as a three-time CEO

[12:42] - The message of his book Amp It Up

[25:01] - Future of Natural Language and Data

[36:29] - Data Management and Industry Transformation Future

[45:13] - Managing Resources in Changing Economic Environment

[50:09] - Amping Up Energy and Intensity Amid Economic Headwinds

Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart and co-founder of Metrodora Institute, a medical center and research institute for neuroimmune axis disorders, shares her personal journey from growing up in France, to leading the Facebook app, to becoming a wartime CEO. Fidji talks about the future of Instacart, their AI strategy, how the current era of AI is different from prior ML waves, and the impact of LLMs in commerce, robotics and healthcare. She also shares how she earns followership from her teams.

** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. **

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Show Notes:

[00:01] - Leading With Impact and Authenticity

[11:48] - Implementing AI

[17:28] - Future of Grocery Shopping With AI

[25:38] - AI in Advertising and Commerce

[32:54] - Metrodora: AI in Biotech and Healthcare

[34:18] - The positive impact of AI, mitigating harm & role of regulations

Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, the leading observability company, discusses the company’s founding story, early product sequencing, platform strategy, and acquisitions. Olivier also shares his thoughts on their more recent expansion into security, and why he’s bullish on the potential for AI in DevOps.

** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. **

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Show Notes:

[00:10] - DevOps and AI Potential

[06:54] - Datadog and Generative AI

[20:40] - Datadog's Acquisition and Expansion Strategy

[31:46] - LLMs in Automation and Precision

[42:35] - Datadog's Customer Value and Growth

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad do another hangout to answer listener questions. Topics include debunking common misconceptions about AI and its implications on the world, the analogy to nuclear power and nuclear safety, the impact of larger context windows, developer productivity, incumbent announcements of AI products, and some requests for (fat) startups.

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Show Notes:

[00:21] - What Are People Getting Wrong About AI Right Now? / New Capabilities of NLP

[04:35] - Nuclear Power and Safety Concerns

[11:12] - Emerging AI Companies and Research

[15:54] - China's Hardware Sanctions and Funding Ramp

[20:34] - Innovation in Heterogeneous Compute Infrastructure

[28:08] - Enterprise Stack and Decision Making

[33:44] - Data's Impact on the World

Today on No Priors, we discuss defense technology, AI, drones, and autonomous vehicles (think giant submarine drones!) with Brian Schimpf, the co-founder and CEO of Anduril, a next-generation defense technology company. From his early days of coding at age 12 to working on self-driving cars, and finally founding Anduril, Brian's incredible journey led him to create innovative solutions for pressing defense problems.

This episode covers the impact of AI, intelligent software, and other technologies to defense. We discuss the challenges of deploying and selling technology in the government spaceBrian shared his perspective on building general-purpose defense technology, the importance of a software-first approach, and how Anduril is working to solve urgent defense problems with speed and efficiency.

As we wrapped up our conversation, we touched on the recent shift in the low cost of space launch, which has changed the way the US thinks about defense. We examined the proliferation of satellites, drones, and hypersonic missiles, and how these technologies can be applied, scaled, and built in a way that can fundamentally shift America's approach to defense. Don't miss this fascinating episode with Brian Schimpf as we uncover the cutting edge of defense technology and its implications for the future.

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Show Notes:

[0:00:01] - Exploring AI in Defense Tech

[0:05:15] - Lower Cost Defense With Intelligent Software

[0:15:10] - Building General Purpose Defense Technology

[0:20:41] - Autonomy in Defense Challenges

[0:25:05] - Machine Learning in Defense & Intelligence

[0:29:06] - Scaling a Defense Tech Company

[0:37:08] - The Future of Defense Technology

[0:46:53] - Allied Forces and Washington Engagement

[0:51:47] - Discussion on Leadership Popularity

In this episode, Sarah and Elad speak with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his unlikely journey from rural Virginia to becoming the driving force behind Microsoft's AI strategy. 

Sarah and Elad discuss the partnership that Kevin helped forge between Microsoft and OpenAI and explore the vision both companies have for the future of AI. They also discuss yesterday’s announcement of “copilots” across the Microsoft product suite, Microsoft’s GPU computing budget, the potential impact of open source AI models in the tech industry, the future of AI in relation to jobs, why Kevin is bullish on creative and physical work, and predictions for progress in AI this year.

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Show Notes:

[00:00] - Kevin Scott's Journey to Microsoft CTO

[12:44] - Microsoft and Open AI Partnership

[21:18] - The Future of Open Source AI

[32:12] - AI for Everyone

[45:29] - AI and the Future of Jobs

[51:44] - The Future of AI and Regulation

[58:10] - Taking a Global Perspective

What if AI could revolutionize healthcare with advanced language learning models? Sarah and Elad welcome Karan Singhal, Staff Software Engineer at Google Research, who specializes in medical AI and the development of MedPaLM2. On this episode, Karan emphasizes the importance of safety in medical AI applications and how language models like MedPaLM2 have the potential to augment scientific workflows and transform the standard of care.

Other topics include the best workflows for AI integration, the potential impact of AI on drug discoveries, how AI can serve as a physician's assistant, and how privacy-preserving machine learning and federated learning can protect patient data, while pushing the boundaries of medical innovation.

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Show Notes:

[00:22] - Google's Medical AI Development

[08:57] - Medical Language Model and MedPaLM 2 Improvements

[18:18] - Safety, cost/benefit decisions, drug discovery, health information, AI applications, and AI as a physician's assistant.

[24:51] - Privacy Concerns - HIPAA's implications, privacy-preserving machine learning, and advances in GPT-4 and MedPOM2.

[37:43] - Large Language Models in Healthcare and short/long term use.